“... their faithful dog. This carol, like some of the secular ballads Hirsh includes (‘Barbara Allan’, ‘The Three Ravens’, ‘The Unquiet Grave’), exists in numerous variants that are still in the repertoire of folk-singers. Hirsh does not translate his Middle English texts, nor does he normalise spellings ‘as if to imply that all of these poems ...”

“... her betrayal. In 1841, when Baudelaire was twenty, Aupick, deciding he’d had enough of the young poet’s wilfulness and insolence, arranged for him to take a sea voyage to Calcutta. Charles’s ‘aberrations had caused cruel anguish to his poor mother’, Aupick explained in a letter to a friend justifying the exile. But like Hamlet, Baudelaire ...”

“... mosque in Manama. Some insight into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal ...”

“... Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always ...”

“... with the star (called ‘Jean Shaw’ and a compound of Veronica Lake, Bette Davis and Loretta Young) revives dangerous nostalgia for Hollywood’s clear-cut moralities:   ‘And I remember – I don’t know if it was that picture or another one – you shot the bad guy. He looks at the blood on his hand, looks down at his shirt. He still can’t ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... 1985, of his selected writings, Visions of Excess (edited with an excellent introductory essay by Allan Stoekl), almost none of Bataille’s work was available in English translation. Over the past few years, new translations (as well as reissues of a few old ones, such as Story of the Eye and Death and Sensuality) have come fast and furious. By yet another ...”

“... to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told. Even when she follows instructions, success isn’t guaranteed. Asked to bring the bat from the closet – Molly means the ...”

“... house ghosts’. This attachment might be exacerbated by the presence in the home of a ‘young, emotionally volatile female family member’ – as with the Enfield Poltergeist, the haunting of a family with two young daughters in London between 1977 and 1979 – to whom such ghosts might be attracted (or who might ...”

“... spare five dollars?’) is the familiar disarming overture to vicious subway muggings. A couple of young blacks do indeed approach the stopped Sherman with a deceptively friendly ‘Yo! Need some help?’ and an omnious walk which Wolfe terms ‘the pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch ...”

“... façade of Lucy’s Edwardian middle-class life? What are they? What are they really? They are a young woman and a young man in Italy for goodness sake, and doesn’t death make that gloriously apparent?One could, at least at first, mistake Checkout 19 for a story of coming-of-age via literature, a genre so often done ...”

“... make considered judgments and to do the right thing. His childhood imagination was fired by Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, W.W. Jacobs’s story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – and there’s still a well-behaved French schoolboy inside him who delights in weird tales of human oddity, pirate ships, revenants and Captain Nemo. In a constellation of freakish ...”

“... the keepers takes place only at the end of the book, and when Mr Ramsay springs ‘lightly like a young man’ out of the boat and onto the rock, he disappears from the narrative.As an enigmatic symbol, the lighthouse has long held an imaginative appeal. The Pharos at Alexandria was remarkable among secular buildings, E.M. Forster wrote, in having ‘taken on ...”

“... detox and drug rehabilitation projects. The London Connection, in Westminster, tries to attract young people between 16 and 26; it has television, a pool table, provides free razors and lunch at 15 pence. The Kaleidoscope Project, in Kingston upon Thames, aims to serve heroin-users in need of treatment. They house a medical team who run a methadone ...”

“... German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and ...”